When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input

Singleton, Jenny L.; Newport, Elissa L.

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2004.05.001

Cited by 274 publications

(202 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…It is possible that child learners will show similar differentiated behaviors across the tests in our experiments, or perhaps they will show an initial tendency to be lexically conservative across measures (Tomasello, 2000). Of course children do eventually generalize, and when they do so, they also sometimes overgeneralize (Austin, Newport & Wonnacott, 2006;Ervin, 1964;Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005;Singleton & Newport, 2004). From the perspective of the current results, the most interesting questions will concern whether children retain a tendency to focus on lexicallybased patterns once they have also begun to generalize -that is, do they give more weight to verb-general statistics than to verb-specific statistics, or (like adults) do they weigh these variables differentially and rationally, depending on the character of the language they are learning and the amount of input they have received?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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193

218

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Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more languagegeneral patterns. For example, verb-argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems (Baker 1979), with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur (Pinker, 1989). Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing (Trueswell et al 1993;Mitchell 1987) and on the role of semantics in this process (Hare et al 2003). The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input-statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Wonnacott

Newport

Tanenhaus

2008

Cognitive Psychology

Self Cite

193

218

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“…It is important to note that this does not imply that regularization is never a one-step consequence of a single learner's behaviour -there is clear evidence that this can happen (e.g. Singleton & Newport, 2004). It is conceivable that certain situations (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

2010

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Human languages may be shaped not only by the (individual psychological) processes of language acquisition, but also by population-level processes arising from repeated language learning and use. One prevalent feature of natural languages is that they avoid unpredictable variation. The current work explores whether linguistic predictability might result from a process of iterated learning in simple diffusion chains of adults. An iterated artificial language learning methodology was used, in which participants were organized into diffusion chains: the first individual in each chain was exposed to an artificial language which exhibited unpredictability in plural marking, and subsequent learners were exposed to the language produced by the previous learner in their chain. Diffusion chains, but not isolate learners, were found to cumulatively increase predictability of plural marking by lexicalising the choice of plural marker. This suggests that such gradual, cumulative population-level processes offer a possible explanation for regularity in language.

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“…Nonetheless, speakers have been shown to apply broad sonority restrictions on structures that are unattested in their language [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. Moreover, sign languages, complete with both phonological and morphological patterns, emerge de novo in the human species [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76]. Signed and spoken languages likewise share common developmental precursors [77] and brain mechanisms [78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86], and at least one of these mechanisms-the capacity to encode phonetic contrasts categorically-is present in all human infants [51,52].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Amodal Aspects of Linguistic Design

Berent¹,

Dupuis²,

Brentari³

2012

PsycEXTRA Dataset

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All spoken languages encode syllables and constrain their internal structure. But whether these restrictions concern the design of the language system, broadly, or speech, specifically, remains unknown. To address this question, here, we gauge the structure of signed syllables in American Sign Language (ASL). Like spoken languages, signed syllables must exhibit a single sonority/energy peak (i.e., movement). Four experiments examine whether this restriction is enforced by signers and nonsigners. We first show that Deaf ASL signers selectively apply sonority restrictions to syllables (but not morphemes) in novel ASL signs. We next examine whether this principle might further shape the representation of signed syllables by nonsigners. Absent any experience with ASL, nonsigners used movement to define syllable-like units. Moreover, the restriction on syllable structure constrained the capacity of nonsigners to learn from experience. Given brief practice that implicitly paired syllables with sonority peaks (i.e., movement)-a natural phonological constraint attested in every human language-nonsigners rapidly learned to selectively rely on movement to define syllables and they also learned to partly ignore it in the identification of morpheme-like units. Remarkably, nonsigners failed to learn an unnatural rule that defines syllables by handshape, suggesting they were unable to ignore movement in identifying syllables. These findings indicate that signed and spoken syllables are subject to a shared phonological restriction that constrains phonological learning in a new modality. These conclusions suggest the design of the phonological system is partly amodal.

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When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from inconsistent input

Cited by 274 publications

References 30 publications

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: Distributional learning in a miniature language

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

Amodal Aspects of Linguistic Design

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